A Tale of a Bureau

When I was growing up, I remember sharing a bedroom with my younger sister, Emily. At times, it was great, and then again, like all siblings sharing a bedroom, there were times that it was horrible. We argued like all siblings do, but when we got along, things were great. One of the coolest parts of sharing a bedroom was that our beds could be made into bunk beds, giving us so much room for activities (Can you name that movie? Don't worry, they were made to be bunk beds - we didn't have to nail them together!). The other thing that I remember about our bedroom growing up was a bureau, which I have recently learned was a part of the bunk bed set. When we moved when I was in middle school, the bureau moved with us to our new house, and I had it in my bedroom since we each had our own rooms at that point.

When I went to college, the bureau stayed in my old bedroom and I used it to store clothes I only wore during the summer and items I didn't bring to college. When Dylan and I moved in together my senior year, the bureau finally made it's way into our new apartment. It has since traveled with us to every place we have lived since then - Indiana included. And turns out, that's not the only traveling it has done. This bureau was in the house that my mom's side of the family owned in Newport, RI.

The family owned house in Newport was purchased in the late 1800s, and then during the 1920's, was used as a boarding house, run by a close friend of the family. This bedroom set was purchased for one of the bedrooms in the house. Once my grandmother was married in the 1950s, the house was returned to single-family home status, and my grandmother lived there with my grandfather, my uncle, and my mom. The bureau traveled with them when they moved from the house to New Jersey and Washington, D.C., and then back to the same house in Newport again. When my mom married, she took the bedroom set, and that is how I ended up with it.

Now, since the bureau was built sometime around the 1940's, it was scratched up and had a lot of marks on it from it's years of moving. With it being in my possession now, I wanted to refinish it. It was a reddish-brown color, and I wanted it darker, so using my random orbital sander, I took off all of the polyurethane and all the stain, bringing it down to it's beautiful maple hardwood. Because of the detail, I actually used my Dremel to sand some of the more difficult parts of the bureau.

Before staining the bureau, I actually contemplated making a slight modification to it. The detailed rounded pieces along the bottom of the bureau are not exactly the style that I am drawn to, and since they are just decorative pieces that frame out the bottom and hide the legs of the bureau, cutting away some of the wood wouldn't compromise the structure of the bureau. I measured out the squared shape that I wanted and had my Dremel saw ready to cut, but realized that not only was my blade not long enough to go through the wood, but I didn't really want to make it look different after hearing about it's history in the family. Even though it's not my style, I figured that keeping it's original skeleton was important in a piece with so much history.

Therefore, not making the cuts to the bureau led me straight into refinishing it. The raw wood was absolutely beautiful and in great shape, but to help it accept the new stain, I put on a coat of Minwax Pre-Stain Wood Conditioner and let it sit for fifteen minutes. It's funny too, because the color of the wood with the conditioner on it was just slightly lighter than the original color. I wish I had a better before photo, but the one I took was super blurry and I don't have my picture backup drive unpacked yet.

I wiped the excess off and then applied my first coat of Minwax Jacobean stain. You can see that the last coat of poly on the top was so shiny that it was reflecting the drop ceiling grid onto the surface! Aside from that though, this bureau looks absolutely beautiful now!

Two coats of stain, and three coats of polyurethane later, and the bureau was finished! Dylan helped me put it in the guest bedroom this morning, and it's the first piece of furniture in the room! I'm so excited to finally get the house put together, and I'm so excited that this piece of family history has a new place and a new look. I really love the dark tones of the wood and even though Dylan and I just spent hours painting the moulding in this room white, I think I like the way it stands out against the white beadboard and trim.

I just need to find some cool hardware for the drawers and then it's all set. Oh, and it will need a lamp and some books too, just to finish it off.

I've got a few more pieces to refinish, which should take me a about a week each, since I don't have a lot of time after work to get these projects done, and then we'll be at the point where we can actually look like we live in this house!

Have you been refinishing furniture lately? What's your favorite stain color?

Sanding Indoors Makes a Mess

Whoa there, it's been a while, huh? I've kind of fallen off the wagon with blogging, and more specifically, Flash Sale Friday, because things have been so much busier than normal and I just haven't had the time! I'm really hoping to jump back on, so look for one at the end of the week!

In the meantime, I've been up to a lot. I have started to refinish some of the furniture for the house, and am still constantly looking for other pieces to add to our decor. I knew that I was taking a risk in sanding down the furniture in the basement, but it's just been too cold outside to do this in the garage or the driveway.

What I didn't realize was that even though my random orbital sander has a dust bag attached that it wouldn't catch everything. So, my basement ended up covered in a sheet of sawdust. And I'm talking like 1/8" of sawdust, everywhere, including on the top of the laundry detergent bottles and covering the hot water tank. Everywhere.

Prior to this, I was using our house vacuum to clean things up because they weren't that messy, but I just didn't think that my house vacuum would like that dust all that much, so I bought a Wet/Dry Vacuum, and boy am I glad that I did. The basement was a mess, and this thing worked soooo well, thankfully.

And now that the basement is clean again, I've started to actually paint and stain the furniture. It's a lengthy process, especially when I only have time to work on the projects when I get home from work.

All set up for painting, this is the two-piece hutch that will be going in the craft room. Along the right side of the picture you can start to see the drawers of the bureau, which will be refinished for the guest bedroom.  Once these two pieces are done, I'll start on my favorite item - the card catalog! One thing I have learned from this process is that I will be making a sanding station in the basement, cordoned off with some drop cloths, that way the entire basement doesn't end up in another layer of dust!

Live and learn, right?

What have you been up to recently? Any plans to refinish furniture?

Floor Refinishing, Except Not

Well, after I led you on and everything about potentially having our floors refinished, it's not happening.

Unfortunately the cost was too much for us to be able to do comfortably right now, so since it was mostly a cosmetic change anyways, we decided that now is not the time to do it. Maybe down the line we will get to it, but now is not the time.

However a few weeks ago, I was ready to get this done, and we even delayed painting the house and going to IKEA thinking that our floors were getting redone.  Also, we didn't even get a Christmas Tree!! I know, I know, there is still time, but it's really not worth the hassle right now with the holiday being only a few days away now.  Which just means that next year I'm going to get that tree as soon as I can!

We were debating between Dark Walnut and Jacobean, both by Minwax, and as suggested in the comments of this post, we wanted to see each in the light of the rooms.  So, in preparing for the floors being refinished, I went to the hardware store and picked up a 2'x1' board in Red Oak, which is the type of wood that our hardwoods are.  I grabbed a small can of the two colors we were debating for stain and a small can of poly to go over the top.

I prepped the board that I got by sanding it, then wiped all of the sawdust off with a dry cloth, and actually used one of those compressed air cans that you can use to clean out electronics to get the remaining dust particles off.  I then water-popped the board, by wetting the wood with warm water and letting it air dry.  This is done so that the grain opens and the wood absorbs more stain, therefore making the color as dark as the swatch.

After the wood was dry, I used some painter's tape to mark the center of the board so that I could apply one color to each side for comparison.  If you're not OCD like me, you don't have to measure out the exact center of your board, but you know that I did!

Then, it was time to add the stain. I used a small foam brush from the hardware store and applied the stain with the grain of the wood.  Once I had the board covered, I went over it again one more time to make sure that the coverage was even.  I did the same thing for the second color stain on the other half of the board, and then let the stain sit for 15 minutes.  

I couldn't find any of my work cloths because of the shambles that my garage is currently in, so I grabbed a pair of old but clean socks and used them to wipe the extra stain off the boards, again going with the grain of the wood.  I then left it overnight to dry before applying the first coat of polyurethane.  

The next day, I wiped down the board with a slightly damp paper towel, just to make sure that there was no lint or dust on it that would get stuck in the polyurethane. Using a clean foam brush, I applied the poly in a not-too-thin-but-not-too-thick coat, with the grain of the wood, then using the reflection of a flashlight, made sure there weren't any big bubbles on the surface. I left this to dry overnight, just like I did the stain.  

The next day, I repeated the last step, but before applying the final coat of polyurethane, I used some fine-grit sandpaper and sanded down the board gently, making sure that any bubbles that the poly left were popped and the new coat would stick better and finish off all the coverage.  Once that was left overnight to dry, we were ready to remove the painter's tape.  

Since I polyurethaned over the edge of the tape on the board, I used a razor blade to score the seam so that it didn't leave little pieces of tape everywhere. After that, the tape came up very easily.

Just a note about using painter's tape with stain - it might not work the way you want it to.  If you notice in the picture below, I had a lot of bleeding with the stain under the tape. Because this was just a sample board and not a piece of furniture, I didn't mind, but if you're trying to use this technique with a piece of furniture or an important project, you will likely end up with some bleeding.

And with that, we had a finished board to bring from room to room to test the stain colors.  

But, then we didn't use it, because we figured out that refinishing the floors was out of the question for the time being.  So now I just have this board that's stained two different colors for no reason. But, when the time comes to actually have the floors done, I'll have this ready to throw in every room to make sure we like the color.  

Anyone else really get their hopes up on refinishing the floors and then not have them done? I was devastated, but I'd rather hold off so we can do some other smaller and less expensive things to the house.